........	....... Sandor Lehoczky, Richard Rusczyk, and Sam Vandervelde met during the summer of 1987 when they attended the Math Olympiad Summer Program at the US Military Academy. Their mutual interests (such as playing pool, seeking adventure, and guzzling mandarin orange Slice) led them to become fast friends. Upon graduating from high school they formed the partnership Greater Testing Concepts and began producing The Mandelbrot Competition. After many years of creating mind-bending questions and writing the two volume best-seller The Art of Problem Solving, Sandor is seeking his fortune in the world of finance and beyond while Richard oversees the world-famous web site by the same name, Art of Problem Solving. .......
	Not surprisingly, Sam Vandervelde enjoyed taking math contests while in high school and college. He is proud of winning ARML his senior year while attending Amherst County High School, as well as being selected for the 1989 IMO team which took 5th place in West Germany later that summer. Dr. Vandervelde received his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in June 2004 and is currently on the math faculty at St. Lawrence Univesity, New York. He teaches number theory, college geometry, combinatorics, and coaches the Putnam team, among other things. He also hopes to meet many past Mandelbrot participants and work together with them developing fascinating research projects. His mathematical interests include graph theory, algebraic number theory, and Mahler measure. He also enjoys playing pickup soccer and singing choral pieces. He resumed his graduate studies in 2001 after a five year stint teaching mathematics at The Roxbury Latin School, a private boys school in Boston for grades seven through twelve. While Dr. Vandervelde likes to think that his students will remember him for his lucid presentation of astoundingly interesting mathematical concepts, he suspects that they will sooner recall his somewhat creative teaching techniques, which included such events as the fall Bulls-eye Tic-tac-toe tournament, calculator licenses, and the ever popular game of Minions. As if dreaming up fiendishly difficult questions for the Mandelbrot Competition were not enough to keep him occupied, Sam is also the proud father of two little boys, born in August 2001 and April 2004. His older son's latest exploits include slugging baseballs into the neighbor's yard, bombing down the nearby ski slopes, and beating his father at Uno. Meanwhile the younger one recently settled on Honey Nut Cheerios as the best food on earth, has learned how to double small numbers in Spanish thanks to They Might Be Giants, and regularly attempts to break his own records at getting dirty. May 2008   ... Top of page | Introduction | Home